Sixty years on and the El Alamein armaments still maim

As Monty's 8th Army veterns gather for a final reunion, Neil Tweedie reports on the deadly legacy that remains from the battle that turned the tide of war

12:01AM BST 19 Oct 2002

War has a habit of conferring unwelcome significance on obscure places. So it was for a small settlement sitting out in the Western Desert some two hours drive along the coast road from the Egyptian city of Alexandria.

To the Bedouin it was known as El Alameen, or the place of two flags. A fitting title for its moment in history.

It was there, at 9.40pm on Oct 23, 1942, that the climactic battle of the campaign in North Africa began.

Then, the night-time silence of the desert was ripped apart by a furious artillery bombardment from 1,000 British guns. In its wake came the Royal Engineers, clearing pathways through the minefields for infantry and armour.

For the next 12 days the Eighth Army, under the guidance of its new commander, Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery, battered away at the exhausted and numerically inferior German and Italian divisions lying in its path.

Related Articles

Eventually, despite heavy losses in men and tanks, and the failure of his original plan of attack, Montgomery succeeded in breaking his opponent.

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who had rushed back to the battlefield from his sick bed in Germany, managed a skilful withdrawal, depriving Montgomery of a battle of annihilation. But there would be no going back.

Rommel, who had dreamed of his victory march into Cairo, and the seizure of the Suez Canal and the Persian oilfields beyond, would never again take the initiative.

The following year, the last German forces in Tunisia surrendered, and the Desert War, which had ebbed and flowed for almost three years, was at an end.

Today, the 60th anniversary of the victory at El Alamein, the decisive battle in the North African campaign, will be remembered by the 40 or so British veterans able to make the journey to the cemetery that overlooks part of the battlefield.

Speeches will be made and flowers laid in honour of the 13,500 men of the British Empire and Commonwealth who died there.

A ceremony in London next week will mark the actual anniversary.

Only 7,367 of those who perished in the scrub and sand have found a named grave in the immaculate cemetery at El Alamein, another 815 lying "Known Unto God". As for the rest, they are out there, somewhere in the sand.

The ceremonies this year have an added significance, most probably being the last of their kind.

The Eighth Army Association will disband on Dec 31 this year in recognition of the increasing infirmity of its members.

Their average age is now 84, and the association, its subscriptions declining, is running on reserves.

Still, their exploits, and those of their comrades who died, will be remembered. There are other casualties of the battle, however, who have already been forgotten.

A few miles to the south of the cemetery, near the dilapidated railway station that made El Alamein worthy of a name, three of them gather to show their wounds.

Soultan Saad, Faiez Fadiel and Mastour Moftah are victims of the landmines laid by the British, Germans and Italians in the summer and autumn of 1942, and which to this day claim lives and limbs.

Sitting on the floor in the home of a friend, the Bedouin shepherds describe how they came by their injuries.

Mastour, 55, lost three fingers when, while tending his flock in the desert one night, he lit a fire that detonated a mine. The explosion also left him deaf in one ear.

Faiez, 78, suffered a similar fate when he picked up a mine while examining some wrecked vehicles left over from the battle. As he threw it away it exploded, smashing his hand and leaving him half blind.

Soultan, 77, was one of the first victims of the mines left after the armies moved on.

He was 18 years old when he picked up a mine that exploded, blowing off his fingers and leaving him totally blind. He must now rely on his grandson to lead him around.

According to the Egyptian authorities, there are some 20 million pieces of unexploded ordnance in a 40-mile belt of land south of El Alamein, of which five million are landmines.

The area affected is estimated to cover 2,900 square kilometres, but an accurate estimate is impossible, given the lack of detailed maps and the tendency of mines to shift in the sand when subjected to winds and rainfall. The toll from this deadly legacy of the battle is high.

Accurate figures for the number of dead and injured are hard to come by, given that most of the victims are nomadic Bedouin.

But a team from the United Nations Mines Action Service (Unmas) that visited Egypt in 2000 was told that as many as 600 people had been killed, and another 7,700 injured, by unexploded ordnance around El Alamein since 1945.

In a subsequent report, the team warned that even those figures could not be trusted because incidents occurring during its time in Egypt had not been logged by the authorities.

While praising the mine clearance expertise of the Egyptian army, it warned that far more would have to be done to clear the area if fresh casualties were not to be suffered by families moving into the area as part of the Egyptian government's drive to develop the coastal area around Alamein.

Despite the scale of the problem, Britain, which is responsible for much of the problem, gives no bilateral aid to Egypt for mine clearance, preferring to channel funds through Unmas and other agencies.

The last direct help from Britain came in 1996 when the Government donated £600,000 worth of mine clearance equipment to Egypt, but since then other countries have taken priority.

Of the £4 million given by Britain to Unmas this year, almost half went to Afghanistan. The British also dispute the extent of the problem in Egypt, producing figures suggesting that there are only about 900,000 mines in the Alamein area, half British, half German and Italian.

"The mine problem in Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia was seen in Britain as a human rights problem, but as a developmental problem in Egypt because it affected economic development," said a senior British source.

The distinction is probably lost on Soultan, who relies on government benefits of £16 a month to get by.

A few miles further south, down a track in the desert, lies a walled compound containing the fruits of the Egyptian army's work.

How well its engineers are doing in clearing the old minefields is unknown, given the Egyptian government's pathological obsession with military secrecy.

But one look inside the compound is enough to give an indication of the problem. There lie hundreds upon hundreds of mines, together with artillery shells of every conceivable size, rusted and blackened and as menacing as ever.

Rommel had a name for the mine-infested area around Alamein, the graveyard of his ambitions. He called it the Devil's Garden. And so it remains to this day.